Chapter 8

With that he sat his teeth hard and pulling a leather pouch out of his pocket, began stuffing the pipe decisively. Caroline waited for him to continue, but as he lit the pipe and puffed at it in silence, she concluded that the interview was at an end, and started up the path.

"You'd better not--" he began, but stopped suddenly and appeared to reconsider. "Oh, I don't know," he added, "it might be better, after all. Go along."

The trail was little more than a worn line in the grass, now; soon it turned sharply to the left, skirted the wood, and led to a tiny, dilapidated cottage. Caroline had more than once passed it by under the impression that it was abandoned, or used perhaps for storing ice or wood; but to-day a thin curl of smoke stained the blue above it and through the open door of the one living-room that formed its ground-floor she saw a scarlet Navajo blanket, on which reposed a magnificent snowy Angora cat. A great green bough covered one of the walls, and a few chairs, a square pine table and a guitar flung against a pile of bright cushions, completed the furniture. At the further end of the room, stretched upon the mate to the Angora's blanket, lay a young woman, sobbing violently.

Caroline hesitated, but Henry D. Thoreau recognized grief, and knew perfectly well what to do. Stepping quietly over to the prostrate figure he encircled it once, looking for a point of vantage, then selecting two little white, pink-tipped fingers, he licked them caressingly.

The sobbing ceased: the girl drew a longer shaking breath.

"Is that you, Mimi?" she said huskily, "I didn't know you cared as much as--oh, what is that?"

Her hand had fallen on the little bull-dog's smooth, stiff coat and she started up in surprise. Caroline smiled shyly into her big, stained gray eyes.

"It's all right--Henry D. never bites--do you feel bad?" she asked.

The girl pushed back a handful of crinkly, chestnut hair from her damp face and rose, shaking out her skirts.

"Y--yes," she said, frankly, "yes, I do. Do you know why?"

"No. Why?" Caroline inquired.

"Because I can't make huckleberry bread," the girl assured her solemnly. "I--I've been trying all the morning. Look in there."

Caroline peered into the little lean-to, filled to over-flowing with a stove, some tin cooking pans, a table full of soiled dishes and a case of kitchen sundries, half unpacked.

"You did get it all over, didn't you?" she observed cheerfully, noting the prints of doughy fingers on oven and chairs and the burned, odorous wreck, resting in soggy isolation in the middle of the floor. "You cooked it a little too much, maybe."

"Maybe," the girl assented listlessly. "I was going to have it for luncheon. The woman promised to be here by ten o'clock, and I got the breakfast well enough--after a fashion--but she hasn't come, and I'm s-so hungry!"

Her eyes filled again. "It's simply filthy here," she murmured. "Do you know anybody we could depend on--oh, how stupid of me, of course you don't."

"There's Luella," Caroline suggested, "she's right near here, and she makes lovely huckleberry bread. Shall I go get her? Old Gr'--the gentleman that she keeps house for takes his nap now, and I know she could come."

The look of relief on the girl's face was enough, and Caroline hurried out, leaving Henry D. Thoreau, who seemed to feel responsible for his hostess's peace of mind, snuggled in her lap.

She burst into Luella's placid afternoon kitchen, big with her news, bustling about excitedly, while Luella methodically packed a market-basket with half a cold chicken, an untouched loaf of huckleberry bread, a pan of tiny biscuits and a glass of currant jelly.

"Butter I know they've got, and milk, for I see Wilkins stop up there this mornin' as I come down, and I wondered who on earth had taken that God-forsaken little cottage. 'Twasn't occupied last season. Cryin' right out loud, was she? She must 'a been all tired out to make such a fuss over a tin o' huckleberry bread. I s'pose she hasn't got many breakfasts in her life. Ten to one 'twas Myra Tenny that disappointed her: it sounds like her. Always undertakin' more 'n any one woman c'd possibly attend to, and then goin' back on you. Pretty cross himself, was he? Well, they'd had words, most likely. They take it hard at first. They ain't long married, of course, if they're young as you say. Poor things. There, I guess that's about all."

Luella closed the kitchen door softly and they hurried along the trail.

"He's off as sound as a baby," she confided to Caroline, "sometimes he'll sleep two hours, he's up so much in the night."

As the relief expedition neared the cottage, Henry D. Thoreau bounded out to greet them, the girl behind him, still flushed and swollen-eyed, but with her thick, reddish hair newly braided in a crown around her head.

"Good afternoon," Luella called cheerily, "I hear you're in trouble up here! You ought to let me known--I'm the one for jobs like this. Just let me into the kitchen, Miss----" She paused, but as the girl made no attempt to help her, continued easily, "well, I should say so! Got a little burnt, didn't it? Never mind, you ought to a' seen my first corn-meal muffins! Now you just step out and rest a minute, dear, and by the time you've called your husband I'll have a little lunch scratched up and you'll feel so different you won't know yourself. It's surprisin' how distressed you c'n get on an empty stomach. 'Tis your husband, isn't it, or is it your brother?"

"No, it's not--yes. It--it's not my brother," the girl said in a low voice.

"No," Luella repeated soothingly, "no, I see. That's a fine cat, ain't it? I've read of 'em--Angora, ain't it?--but I never saw one. They say they're mostly deaf. Is that one?"

"Yes. No--I don't know. I don't believe she is," the girl murmured, brokenly. She seemed newly distressed; her lips, very red against her white cheeks, quivered, her full breast strained against her white linen blouse.

Luella strode lightly about the disorderly little kitchen; she had forgotten the very presence of the girl, it seemed, for as she gathered the soiled dishes, coaxed the fire, filled the kettle and hastily removed the traces of the ill-fated huckleberry bread, she hummed a tune and appeared to see only her work.

Caroline was on her knees before the Angora and knew nothing of the flight of time, though it was really hardly more than a quarter of an hour before the kitchen rivalled Luella's in neatness and the pine table in the living-room, covered with a fresh cloth, and shiny plated silver, only waited its host.

"Now if you'll step out and call your husband, Miss--I didn't just get the name?" said Luella invitingly.

The girl rose from the chair where she had been sitting, motionless, except for her eyes, which had followed every movement of the older woman. She stood very straight and threw her head back with a gesture almost defiant.

"My name is Dorothy Hartley," she declared, and ran abruptly out of the cottage.

"Well, well," Luella shook her head whimsically, "she's pretty well wrought up, isn't she? Sweet little thing, too--real loveable, I sh'd say. It don't seem possible he'd be mean to her. But o' course he wants his breakfast fit to eat, just the same. I put a place for you, Car'line, 'cause I know you c'n eat, no matter what time 'tis--you're 's empty's a bag. There he comes--my, but he's haughty! He looks like somebody in one o' those novels, don't he, now?"

They came slowly up the path, hand in hand, like children, her gray eyes on the ground, his black ones challenging the world. The clear mountain air carried his words easily to the two in the door:

"Now, dearest, be brave! Remember, we are right, and we know we are right."

She clutched his hand nervously, but made no reply.

"Come right in," Luella urged them hospitably, "you must be 'most starved."

"Oh, no," he assured her, with a loyal glance at the girl, "I--I had a good breakfast, didn't I, dear?"

But his eyes brightened at sight of the half chicken and the omelet, glowing in a parsley wreath, and he had broken one of the puffy rolls and plunged into a great cup of coffee before he addressed Caroline.

"You seem to be a valuable person to know," he observed, "you and Matthew Arnold or John Greenleaf Whittier or what-ever-his-name-is."

Caroline looked embarrassed and helped herself to jelly.

"You have helped my--we are very much obliged to you, I am sure," he turned to address Luella, who was passing from stove to table, "aren't we, dearest?"

The girl sat with her hands in her lap, staring at her plate.

"Yes, of course," she agreed, "certainly."

"If you could come every day--they told me I could find some one to do that--it would be a great accommodation," he went on, with a worried look at the sad face opposite him, "and anything it might be worth, I am sure, Mrs.----"

"Judd, Luella Judd," she supplied, briskly. "Now, dear, try to eat a little, do! That omelet'll do you good. And that's a lovely piece o' breast I cut you off. It was all right my bringin' it, for the old gentleman never touches cold meat and the jelly's my own. There, that's right. I thought you'd like it, once you began. There's no need to tempt Car'line and your husband, is there? But that's all right: young folks ought to eat--I never grudged mine a crumb, and the Lord knows they eat me out of house and home."

The young man, indeed, ate voraciously, and under Luella's kindly domineering the hostess herself cleared her plate. The hot coffee brought the color to her cheeks, and she had even smiled at Henry D. Thoreau. Caroline had never seen anyone prettier. She had a great dimple in either cheek, and her gray eyes smiled with the sweetest confidence into the black eyes opposite: any one could see that they loved each other very much, even if they had "had words."

"Just a little more o' the huckleberry bread, dear?" Luella urged her. "I've been sort o' plannin' out how I c'd manage to get here every day, and I guess I can, if you'll be content to wait a little for your breakfast. My old gentleman don't have anything but a cup o' coffee in the morning, an' I c'd be over here by ha' past eight, easy enough, Mr. Hartley, if that suited you--"

"Wortley, my name is Wortley," the young man interrupted, hastily.

Luella looked puzzled.

"Wortley?" she repeated, "why, that's--well, never mind, it's none o' my business. I cert'nly thought she said Hartley, though. Well, if you'n Mrs. Wortley _can_ wait till ha' past eight--"

"Frank, dear," the girl broke in appealingly, but the young man shook his head.

"No, darling," he said firmly, and then looking straight at Luella, he went on: "This lady's name is Hartley. We are not--we are not related."

Luella stared blankly at him a moment, then turned to the girl. But she, though she got up from her seat and going over to the young man seized his hand and pressed it between her own, did not lift her eyes to the woman's troubled and accusing gaze.

Luella drew a long breath, took off her checked apron and rolled it mechanically into a bundle. Her face had hardened; only the shrewdness was left in her eyes.

"You might 'a told me so before," she said briefly, and turned on her heel.

The girl was crying on his shoulder. "Tell her, Frank, please tell her why," she begged, through her sobs.

Luella faced her sternly. "He needn't trouble to tell me why," she said, "I know more'n you think, maybe. I know who your father is, Mr. Wortley, an' I guess I understand pretty well by now what his troubles are. If he forbade you marryin' each other, he had his reasons, I don't doubt, for he's a good man, if he is quick-tempered, an'--"

"He _didn't_ forbid our marrying," the young man broke in sharply, glaring with ill-suppressed irritation at Luella, while he softly patted the girl's shoulder. "He begged us on his bended knees to marry, though I don't know how you know him."

Luella paused with her hand on the door.

"What!" she exclaimed sharply. "Then it was your folks?" She looked at the girl.

"No, it wasn't!" Dorothy lifted her head. "They b-begged us on _their_ b-bended knees, too," she sobbed and disappeared again.

"For the Lord's sake!" Luella muttered. Then turning fiercely on him she took a step forward.

"Do you mean to tell me you're scoundrel enough--" she began, but the young man--he was really only a boy--shook his head angrily.

"Not at all, not at all," he burst out with a curious likeness to his father, "I'm no more a scoundrel than you are, Mrs. Judd, and you'll oblige me by acting accordingly."

It was so evident that he meant what he said, he appeared so righteously indignant, that Luella paused, dumbfounded, twisting the apron in her hands.

"Wh-why ain't you married, then?" she demanded.

The young man surveyed her calmly. "Because I--we disapprove of marriage," he said.

Luella turned a brick-red; her mouth opened vaguely. Though she spoke not a word, he answered her amazed face.

"The conditions of marriage at the present day," he stated loftily, "are not such as to lead me--to lead us to suppose that as an institution it has accomplished its purpose. Where it is not merely legalized--"

"Oh, Frank!" the girl moaned softly, putting her little hand over his opened lips. He kissed it gently, but removed it.

"To say nothing of the absolute misery you can see all about you as a result of a chain that ought long ago to have been broken, or better still, never--"

"And before that child, too!" Luella burst out. "Caroline, you get right up and come home. I never heard anything like it in my life. Come this minute, now!"

Caroline rose unwillingly; she thought Luella unnecessarily severe.

"As to that," young Mr. Wortley announced composedly, "we differ again. The sooner these matters are discussed frankly before children, the sooner we shall have fewer unhappy men and women. There is nothing whatever in my intentions or Miss--or Dorothy's, to shock or affront the youngest child. I have no children myself, but--"

"Humph!" Luella sniffed furiously, "I sh'd hope not!"

"--but _if_ I had," he pursued evenly, "I should teach them precisely--"

"Look here," Luella interrupted roughly, "look me in the face, both of you!"

They turned their eyes full on her, the boy's dilated to fanaticism, glowing with obstinacy; the girl's, wet and pleading, miserable, but full of love. Luella, with narrowed lids, bored into those clear young eyes: no shadow of deceit, no hint of shuffling or double-dealing could withstand that relentless scrutiny.

Slowly her face softened, her eyebrows relaxed, her hold on the twisted apron loosened.

"I guess we better talk this over," she said decisively, closing the door and seating herself squarely in the chair nearest it. "How old did you say you was, Mr. Wortley?"

The forensic expression faded helplessly from the boy's face. He clutched at it, but it failed him, and with the air of a pupil addressing his teacher, he replied: "I didn't say, but I'm twenty-one."

Luella nodded. "An' you can't be a day over nineteen, can you?" she demanded of the girl. The braided chestnut head shook sadly.

"I thought not. I s'pose you've found out that your views ain't shared by most o' the world," she proceeded, with a fine air of impartiality.

"I--we have been very much misunderstood," said the boy stiffly, "but I have never been in the habit of allowing other people's ideas to affect my actions."

"You been spoiled, you mean," Luella interpolated, "I thought so. Spoiled to death, prob'ly."

He bit his lip. "But I hope I--we are prepared for anything--_anything_," he repeated with emphasis, "that may result from the course we have taken. I expect the results will be unpleasant--I expect it fully."

"I guess your expectations 'll be fulfilled right enough," she responded promptly. "And as for bein' prepared--you remind me o' my father, Mr. Wortley. He used to say he'd been prepared for death since the age o' seven years, but he did hope the Lord wouldn't take advantage of it. Is--is she prepared, too?"

He looked lovingly at the girl who crouched on the floor beside him. "Dorothy and I think precisely the same in everything," he said proudly, "don't we, my dearest one?"

Luella's lips twitched; she looked at the flushed arrogant young face with irrepressible admiration.

"I reely b'lieve you think so!" she declared, and as his hand clinched and his eyes flashed dangerously, she raised her hand with a warning gesture.

"There, there now, I get enough o' that from your father!" she admonished him, adding quickly, "Does he know you're here?"

"I don't know," he answered irritably, "I never supposed _he'd_ be here. I came up here because I'd made all my plans to--and I never let my plans be interfered with, if I can possibly avoid it. I told the man to get it ready for me, but just before we started he telegraphed that it was engaged for the season. But I came all the same, because I knew this little one would be empty. Father bought it up to protect himself. Does he know I'm here?"

Luella looked thoughtful. "I reely don't know," she said slowly.

"It'll come pretty hard on her, doin' her own work, won't it?" she went on, watching him curiously. Then, as he started angrily, "Oh, there ain't nobody here will come, by the day, or any other way--I sh'd s'pose you'd known that. And as for any o' the cottage people--heavens an' earth, Car'line, will you get up an' go home? I don't know what's come over me to forget that child--she sits so still--"

But as Caroline got sulkily from her seat, cowed by Luella's stern face, Dorothy put out her hand and caught the child's dress.

"Oh! Oh!" she cried hysterically, "don't send her away--don't, Frank! L-let me have somebody!"

"There, you see!" said Luella sadly, "you see how 'tis, Mr. Wortley. Do you mean to say you have the heart--"

"Dorothy, I don't understand you at all," said the young man, with evident self restraint.

"You probably do not realize the very trying position you put me in. I hope it is not necessary to explain to you, Mrs. Judd, that if Miss Hartley _wishes_ to marry me, she has but to say the word, and it shall be done instantly--instantly!" he repeated with emphasis, "as if," Luella said later, "he'd had a minister in his side pocket."

"There, my dear, hear that!" she cried triumphantly, "now just tell him what you want--"

"You horrid woman, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" the girl broke in furiously. "How dare you intimate--as if I didn't know that Frank would do anything in the world I asked him to!"

"Oh, no, dearest," he broke in satirically, "that's a poor basis for action in this beautiful world of ours! Catch your man and tie him tight before he has time to change his mind. Then he'll be obliged to stay by you--you've got him hand and foot! That is love!"

"It's just as well, sometimes, though," Luella inserted placidly.

"Do you suppose I would ever," the girl stormed, "unless I--oh, dear, will somebody understand? Don't you know that my--that Frank has studied this question very deeply, that it's a matter of principle with us? If you had read all the dreadful things--"

"I am afraid, darling," he interrupted, with cold dignity, "that if your people and mine cannot understand the position I take, if we are actually obliged to take the matter into our own hands, and--and run away, in fact, in order to prove our sincerity, you can hardly expect people of a different--of less--with fewer--"

"I know what you mean, Mr. Wortley," Luella said gravely. She rose to her feet, beckoning to Caroline, whose waist the girl still clasped.

"I haven't got your education," she went on, with a simple humility that became her very touchingly, "we're poor people up here, us 'natives,' and we don't get much time for books, or when we do, we're too tired to read 'em much. I don't doubt you've been to college, yourself, and you've prob'ly learnt a lot about the mistakes that's been made in the world--a lot that I wouldn't understand. But I want to tell you one thing. I'm old enough to 'a been your mother, Mr. Wortley, my oldest boy'd 'a been twenty if he'd lived--and I've buried two besides him. You'll know I've seen trouble when I tell you that I've always thought we'd saved him and Annie if we could 'a had another doctor that'd had more experience with typhoid, and that's an awful thing to feel."

She paused a moment with somber eyes.

"I've worked hard since I was ten years old, and for the last five years there's been nothin' but me between the children and the poor house. You don't know much about that kind o' worry, Mr. Wortley, an' 'taint likely you ever will. I was married when I was nineteen--" Her eyes fell on the girl and softened lovingly, "'an what that means in the country with seven children an' no help, an' the winters what they are here, maybe you can guess a little. But I tell you this: I ain't had the sorrow, all told, that's preparin' for that girl, if you keep on like this. An' I wouldn't change my lot for hers, nor would she, if she knew."

There was a dead silence in the room. Only the short, grunting breaths of the sleeping dog stirred the air. The girl sat as if turned to stone, her arm hard about Caroline; the boy stared doubtfully at the woman, studying her plain, wrinkled face.

"I--I have plenty of money," he said, in a hollow thin little voice, "she will always--"

"Money!" Luella's voice shook with scorn, "what's money? The Lord knows, Mr. Wortley, I need money more'n you ever will, but let me tell you there's things money can't buy. Can you buy children--nice children like this one--to play with your children? Tell me that!"

"I shall never have any children," the girl's voice came in a husky, strained whisper, "I shall be too--too miserable," she concluded softly, and utterly to herself; she had absolutely forgotten the others, even the boy, whose eyes turned incessantly from her face to the older woman's.

Luella's shrewd glance enveloped the strong young figure. "I never heard 't misery prevented 'em," she said dryly.

The boy seemed unable to move, so intense was the concentration of his thoughts; his fingers stuck out stiffly in a purposeless, set gesture.

"If it is true, all that we thought," he said slowly, "then no hardship, no merely personal suffering should prevent ... the experiment must be made ... must inevitably, _sometime_...."

"But not with her, not _her_, Mr. Wortley!" Luella cried. Her expression turned quickly whimsical.

"You remind me o' me an' my mother one time, when I was a girl," she cried. "I wanted to prove that you c'd raise biscuits without the bakin' powder--I was terrible headstrong; I know what 'tis well 'nough, an' how hard 'tis to give 'way--an' she was tryin' to persuade me.

"'I think 't least you might let me make th' experiment,' I says, an' she turned to me--I c'n see her now an',

"'Luella,' says she, 'it's all very well for you to make th' experiment, but I'm the one that'll have to pay the bill!' she says.

"It'll be like that with you, Mr. Wortley--you'll make th' experiment, but _she'll_ pay!"

There was another silence.

"We always pay," Luella added thoughtfully, "it don't seem just fair, but we do."

The young man shook himself suddenly, like a dog fresh from the water.

"I didn't mean to--God knows I wouldn't hurt a hair of her head," he said, in a low voice. His hands relaxed, his shoulders drooped. "It seemed the best thing only this morning--is that what you meant this morning, Dorothy, when we--when we--when I went away?" he asked gently.

She held out her hand to him, still clasping Caroline, and he knelt beside her, one arm around her neck.

"I--I don't want you ever--to do--what you--think--is--is wrong," she said brokenly, but with a brave effort at steadiness. "I'll--I'll never--leave you--Frank."

She gazed adoringly into his eyes, her hand tight in his. Luella's mouth twitched and she choked as she spoke.